The Last Romantic
by CitronPresse
Summary: Mark's great-grandson and Addison's great-granddaughter meet. Futuristic love story. One shot. Pairing: implied Mark/Addison. Characters: OCs.


"Carson Montgomery-Wilder?"

She is startled. She's in the front yard, tending to her plants and she expected to be alone. Nobody ever visits her, nobody ever speaks to her really. They don't approve of her lifestyle, out here with squash and flowers growing and no real money or technology to speak of. It's considered eccentric that she lives in her great-grandmother's old beach house; odd that she likes the real ocean, when most people prefer the simulated version; odd that she doesn't care whether or not she fits into what passes for society in the year 2113 in Division 1 of the West Coast Sector; odd that she refuses to call it that, but calls it Los Angeles, as her grandmother did, because it seems more friendly. There are no angels in 2113, and Carson knows that all too well, but it's nice to imagine that once somebody named a city for them.

He's a stranger, dressed in the nondescriptly sleek, dark blue clothing favored by professionals, quite in contrast to her now tatty, colorful wrap-around dress preserved from an earlier generation of her family. He's tall with short, graying hair and blue-gray eyes and a kind of furtiveness about him that makes her overlook for a second how arresting his looks are. She doesn't see many people, but she sees the world, because she paints it, an old-fashioned art form that nobody cares about any longer, but she paints it and occasionally somebody understands what she sees and that makes it all worth it. So she assesses the stranger as she would the subject of a painting and she finds that he intrigues her.

She stands up and looks warily at him. "Yes," she says, her voice hoarse and a little quavering. She'd like to like people; she likes the ones she meets in books. But today's people scare her; she doesn't understand them; they don't seem to love anything that she does. Maybe not anything at all, because love is strongly discouraged by the authorities now. She clears her throat. "That's me. I'm Carson Wilder. Montgomery-Wilder, I guess."

"Well, you certainly took some finding," he says and then the furtive look gets stronger as he glances down at the ground, before saying, "I'm sorry. I'm Max Sloan. My great-grandfather knew your great-grandmother." Then he smiles and for a second her eyes get lost in his, because she's never seen a man quite like him. Not only because of how he looks, but because his eyes say something about a willingness to be open, a willingness to take a risk and it's enough, in her limited, lonely world, to make her love him just a little, even though she can't quite understand why.

"I guess I had four great-grandmothers," she says, trying not to betray her interest in him. "I never met any of them. Do you mean Elaine or⎯"

"Addison," he interrupts her. "You look just like her." When she raises her eyebrows in confusion, he laughs slightly and adds, "I've seen her photo. Want to see her?"

"Sure." She nods noncommittally. If this guy was anybody else, she would have asked him to leave by now and she needs to inject a little formality, even if it's pretence.

He swings a rucksack off his shoulder and digs around for a viewer. Then calls up the relevant picture and hands her the device. He's careful to keep his distance and she's grateful to him for that. She stretches out her hand and takes the hard, plastic piece of technology, recoiling at the feel of the world she so strenuously ignores. But when she looks into its screen, she's mesmerized.

She glances up at him and touches her hair. "She has red hair," she whispers as she studies the captured memory of her ancestor "and blue eyes."

"Told you you look like her," he says and she nods absently.

"She looks happy," Carson says. "That's nice." She pauses and then looks at him questioningly. "What's she wearing, though? I know it's a long time ago, but they didn't dress that way in her day, did they?"

He laughs. "I wondered about that too. My mom thought the picture must've been taken at her wedding."

"To your great-grandfather?" She asks. "Are we related?"

He shakes his head. "My mom thought it was to my great-grandfather's best friend. There's some letters and stuff he wrote after my great-grandmother died. It seems like they had a complicated life." He sighs. "Sometimes I think my life could do with a little complication. Well, personal complication, anyway. Work's complicated enough as it is."

"I don't work," she ventures. "The authorities don't like it and I'm poor, I guess, and I'd be richer if I worked. But I don't work. Except for myself. I didn't want to become what they wanted me to." This is the most information she's volunteered about herself for years, but she instinctively trusts him.

"You're braver than I am, Carson," he says. "I just went into the family business like I was told." He frowns and adds in a low voice that surprises her with its sudden bitterness, "I think things may have changed a little since my great-grandfather started that particular tradition."

He holds his hand out for the viewer. "Here," he says. "I can show you a photo of him, if you like."

She nods and hands it back and, as she does so, asks, "Max, right? Can I call you Max?"

"Be my guest." He smiles as he searches for the photo he wants, and then beckons her over to look at it with him. It shows two men, one who looks a little like Max, but with even more gray in his hair, and another with dark hair and sad eyes. The picture has a caption: _Drs. Mark Sloan and Derek Shepherd accept the Golden Scalpel award for their work on the rapid healing of post-operative cranial trauma_.

Max points to the grey-haired man. "That's my great-grandfather," he says. "Mark Sloan. And the other guy is Addison's first husband. Mark's best friend. I sort of know his great-grandson a little. He's called Alex. We were at med school together, but we lost touch when I started working at⎯" He breaks off and shakes his head, adding, "Never mind about that." Carson doesn't pursue it; she can tell it's something he doesn't want to talk about and she understands the need for privacy.

Instead, after a moment's hesitation, she asks, "Would you like some wine?" and, when he doesn't answer right away, adds, "We could go out back and drink it on the beach. It's nice out there."

"You have wine?" he asks incredulously. "Real wine, from grapes?"

She shrugs. "Where else would wine come from?"

"Well, generally, nowadays, from a lab," he says.

"You misheard me," she says playfully. It's not that she hasn't got anything to say or any social skills, it's just that she hardly has anyone to talk to. She's enjoying this conversation with a kind, attractive man who doesn't bully her about her lifestyle and she's getting bolder as it goes on. "I said _wine_. The other stuff doesn't deserve the name."

Max laughs. "You're lucky to have wine in Division 1."

Carson narrows her eyes and shakes her head vehemently. "There's no wine in Division 1. But some of us like to make believe we live in California, and there's still some wine left there."

* * *

The evening wears on and the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean and they sip their wine. Carson enjoys watching Max savor his drink with the evident pleasure of someone who hasn't tasted anything real for a very long time. She makes some guacamole with avocados from her garden, which she serves with homemade bread and as they eat this, companionably, he sighs and says, "See this is why I came here. This is why I wanted to meet you."

She puts her head on one side. "To eat guacamole?"

"No" he laughs softly. "To see what life is like. What life could be like." He pauses and then blurts out, "Mark, my great-grandfather . . . he really loved Addison." For some reason this makes Carson blush and she lifts her wine glass to try to hide her face. But he hasn't noticed and he carries on. "I come from the East Coast Sector, Division 1 . . . New York, I guess. It's overpopulated, so they passed a law, when I was thirteen, against marriage and the unsupervised conception of children⎯"

Her raised eyebrows interrupt him and, at first, he stares at her questioningly, before he understands.

"Not watching people fuck!" he says, laughing as her eyebrows rise even higher at his choice of words. "You're only supposed to have kids by in vitro techniques or . . . " he trails off and looks down, apparently embarrassed, "by cloning." He pauses again and then looks at her directly. "People want to fit in. Life's easier that way. But the effect is that nobody wants to fall in love anymore. I mean, you can pay for sex, but like the old band said, 'money can't buy me love.'" He grins at her. She has no idea what he's quoting, but she knows he's deflecting the intensity he just introduced, and she doesn't want him to.

"I don't think we have a law here, but there's always been propaganda," she says. "I don't know whether other people fall in love. All I know is that I never have, but I've read books, ones on paper that Addison and Pete -- Pete was my great-grandfather -- left behind. My family never liked technology. We've always been outsiders and . . . " She realizes she's rambling and checks herself. "Anyway, I always wanted to know what love was like, but nobody ever came along." She breaks off a piece of bread and starts to twist it into small pieces, grateful for the distraction of something to fiddle with. It's not often, it's pretty much never, that she pours out her heart, but somehow she can't help herself with Max.

"Addison was a neonatal surgeon," he says. He's not responding directly, but there's something in his voice that lets her know that he's okay with what she just said and he'll get around to answering, so she discards what's left of the bread, wipes the crumbs off her hands and listens patiently. "I don't think there are many of them left anymore. Not on the East Coast, anyway. Just glorified lab technicians." He pauses and sighs deeply. "Mark was a plastic surgeon. So am I. It's just that what I do . . . " His words trail off and then he looks at her desperately, his eyes bluer than before and full of pent-up emotion. "Do you know anything about 'bio-organic resources?'" he asks her and she shakes her head. "It's a euphemism. They're clones. They look like people. They talk like people. They fucking _are_ people. Sometimes a hell of a lot nicer than the assholes they're there to service." His voice loses its angry edge and fades to a near whisper. "People commission them. The clone lives in a dedicated facility. Then, if the purchaser gets sick or injured, the clone is harvested."

"Harvested?"

"A surgeon, someone with an appropriate specialty, removes the organ and it gets transplanted, grafted, whatever. My job, though, is to make the clone look pretty after the op; sanitize them; make them look acceptable. And then talk them through what's happened to them." He pauses. "My last 'patient' was a cute blonde; FR3502A – they don't have names; she was the resource for a famous actress. She _was_ the resource. They did one too many procedures and I was in on the last one. That's when I left. They make you sign a lot of stuff there and they have a lot of secrets, so I'm 'wanted' now, I guess." He sighs deeply, as though he's coming to terms with his decision. "I don't give a shit, I just had to get away. But if you don't want me here, I'll leave. I didn't know where else to go and I . . . before, when she went through Mark's stuff when my grandma died . . . my mom found out some things about your family. There wasn't a lot to go on but there was enough and I wanted to see what it would be like to be different." His eyes focus on the ground again. "That and I wanted to see her family. The family of this woman that my great-grandfather felt so much for, even after he got married and had kids and grand-kids. Because you can tell from what he wrote, even though he made the best of it, he regretted his entire life that he let her go."

Carson swallows. "You can stay here, if you want to," she says. "Nobody cares about me. And, if someone comes for you . . . well, let them! It's time I stood up for my beliefs, rather than just hiding away with them in my own little world."

For what seems like minutes, Max pauses and then slowly he reaches out his hand and takes hers. She could put it down to years without real human connection, but his touch is electric and warm and she feels like she never, ever wants to let go. She moves a little closer to him and squeezes his hand and they sit together, on the darkening beach and listen to the waves roll in. This can't be analyzed; it makes no sense, but it can't be analyzed. And if she's honest, she doesn't want to. Earlier today, he was a total stranger, now for some reason he's all she wants. If the rest of her life were spent sitting here with him, holding his hand, that would be fine with her. She thinks this is probably what it means to fall in love.

* * *

_Addie. I never knew how to tell you what I felt. I always wanted to come after you. The day after I told you I broke the bet and every day after that, I wanted to tell you that I loved you. But you didn't want me and I knew that. I knew it even more that time you came back to Seattle. Why do you think I acted like such an ass that day? I don't even know why I'm writing this. I know you're never going to read it. And even if you did, I have a family, fucking generations of them, and too much time has passed. Plus, you disappeared. There are computerized records for every goddamn thing now, except for you. I guess I just want to write it down so I know it's true; in case anybody cares. Because they should. We were Mark and Addison. Yeah, we screwed it up. I screwed it up. But we were good together and that means something and I love you. I always have and I always will. I know, I should have said something when it would have made a difference. But I didn't, and I've had to live with that, and I guess this will have to do._

"That's what your great-great-grandfather wrote," Carson says to her daughter, Addison. The little girl can't really understand her, but she listens and plays with her mother's long, red hair and that's enough. Carson just likes sharing this. It's such a beautiful story; and so sad, that so much love was just wasted. But she likes to think, if you wait long enough, even though sometimes you have to wait a really long time, everything has a happy ending. She likes to think, in a way, Mark and Addison got theirs. "Then, after I met your daddy, we were cleaning out the spare room to make more space, and I found this in a box."

_Pete died. Pete died yesterday and I already miss him. He was my friend. He gave me my beautiful son and my grandson. But he died and now I can say it, even though you'll never know this. I just have to admit it and know it myself. I made a mistake. I've had a good life, but I made a mistake. You, Mark Sloan, wherever you are now, were all I thought about. Sometimes you were just a shadow at the back of my mind; and sometimes you filled it until I thought my head would burst. But you, the memory of you, was the one constant thing in my life, in my heart and I hope that somehow, in your heart, you knew that._

She feels a warm presence behind her and looks up through tear-filled eyes to see her husband. He puts a hand out and runs his fingers through her hair and then makes a playful face at their daughter.

"Don't read that stuff, baby," he says. "It just makes you sad and you never even met these people. Neither of us did."

She swallows. "They brought us together," she says. "His words brought you to me."

"I know," he says softly and plants a kiss on the top of her head. "I just don't like to see you unhappy."

"They don't make me unhappy," she says. For the very first time, she shares with him the thought that's constantly in the back of her mind. "Because I think, maybe . . . you and me and Addison . . . we're their happy ending. Even if they didn't get to experience it themselves, they made it possible for us, and we're part of them."

It's three years since Carson and Max first met, and the world is still messed up. Perhaps even more so. But she was right. Nobody cared about her or her little Los Angeles oasis, so nobody looked for him there. They have her garden; they have a few friends to hang out with and barter goods and services. Sometimes she sells a painting; sometimes Max gets to practice a little medicine; and they get by. Most importantly, in their little corner of blissful anonymity, they have each other, each other and their connection with their families. Without their families, she thinks Los Angeles might really have become just Division 1, even for her. So whenever they drink wine on the beach, Carson silently toasts Mark and Addison and thanks them for giving her a future and a life.


End file.
